Re: "Sarge" and "sarge" in the manual

[Jens Seidel <jensseidel@users.sf.net>]

Hi Frans,

> On Sunday 12 December 2004 21:33, Holger Wansing wrote:
> > in german we need, maybe in difference to e.g. english, Sarge
> > (upper case) as discription of the branch and sarge
> > (lower case) for example in filesystem paths.
> >
> > So we need different entities for that.

> Yes, I can see the need for that. For Dutch a capital S would be preferred 
> as well when referring to the release name.

I'm the person who contacted Holger to fix this.

> I've created two additional entities in common.ent:
> <!ENTITY releasename "sarge">
> +<!ENTITY releasename-cap "Sarge">
> +<!ENTITY releasename-uc "SARGE">
>
> - -cap: capitalized
> - -uc:  uppercase

That's indeed a solution, but please note that it is the wrong way to
solve this. XML is used to separate content and style/formating.

What happens if a language team decides to change Debian code names
from one style to another one? They have to substitute one entity
hundreds of times.

The proper solution is to allow each language team to define
&releasename; and to introduce &releasename-dir;. The first one may
expand to Sarge, sarge or whatever (what is used in Greek, Russian,
Chinese, ... which do not use latin characters?) and the second one to
sarge which should be used for filenames, directory names, ...

To support this, it's necessary to review the code and to replace
&releasename; by &releasename-dir; (searching for <filename> should
suffice??).

When you are sure that it's to late for this change, it's also possible
to introduce &releasename-name; in the same way as you suggest and to
use this in the code (or in a few translations only) when we refer to
the name and want our own style. So there's no need to touch English
files.

PS: I suggest to substitute / *- */ by &mdash; (in German we use
" &ndash; " instead).

Please CC: me, I'm not subscribed.

Jens